We’re over half way through our top user tips series (there are only 10, I promise!) and today we’re looking at the latest Outlook Web App (OWA) and how it works on mobile devices such as tablet PCs and smartphones.

When you’re on a traditional device OWA can be a really powerful, browser-based, tool for managing your email, contacts and calendar; however, when you switch to more mobile, smaller and touch-enabled devices having an interface that’s been built for those environments makes more sense.

OWA is sensitive to the browser it’s being viewed on, and the great news is that in the new Office 365 Education there is a version that is specifically optimised for mobile and touch! Here’s how it looks on an iPad:

As you can see, the icons are bigger, the interface focuses on the content and it’s very easy to get access to your information. You can preview the touch-optimised interface on your PC by appending the following strings to your OWA URL:

For the tablet experience append: ?layout=twide

For the mobile experience append: ?layout=tnarrow

So your URL would look like: https://podxxxx.outlook.com/owa/?layout=tnarrow, and would look something like this in Internet Explorer 10: